Our president said:
“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Got it. Who are we to judge savages committing atrocities right now when in our distant and far distant past, "we" did similar things?
This is progress! (Boy, I sure am a glass half-full kind of guy.) Sure, President Obama isn't all hot and heavy about fighting Islamists. But still! Why condemn the president for taking a small but real step?
He did condemn slavery in America. Which we ended 150 years ago.
And what do you know? ISIL practices slavery today!
ISIS has stepped up the use of children in its bloody campaign of terror, the United Nations says -- subjecting them to horrors that include putting price tags on them to sell as slaves.
It has to be safe to hate them for slavery!
He condemns the Crusades as religious conquest. Those kingdoms in the Levant where destroyed 700 years ago.
And what do you know? ISIL has created a caliphate in Iraq and the Levant!
And if we want to bicker and argue over who killed who, let's recall more than just that geographically limited counter-attack.
It has to be safe to condemn religious conquest--even if you have to ignore the original Islamic conquest of the Holy Land well before the Crusades took the land back.
And the president condemned Jim Crow laws which placed some people in legally sanctioned second-class status. It's been fifty years since they've been overturned.
And what do you know, Islam itself--let alone the jihadi nutballs--once had exactly that for non-Moslems!
Sure, many centuries ago this was relatively enlightened for the treatment of religious minorities. But right now ISIL is trying to revive it in their caliphate
It has to be safe to condemn Islamist discrimination against non-Moslems, right?
The president also condemned the West for persecuting non-Christian minorities in the Inquisition. Which faded away many centuries ago.
And what do you know? The jihadis are killing people for being different right now:
Since Yazidis are not a “people of the book,” “they [are] not protected in Islamic law,” Kreyenbroek pointed out. And “they [are] thought to be devil worshipers—and there is nothing as horrible and unclean as devil worshipers.”
This is why ISIS is so intent on eliminating the group—and why the international community is so concerned about a genocide against them[.]
Happening right now, folks. Okay to condemn modern jihadis for this. Right?
And for real yucks, Church intervention in rampant government heresy trials actually saved many lives!
How are you enjoying your nuance, now?
Really, after the president condemns things Christians have not done in many decades or centuries, surely it shouldn't take too much effort to coax him into fighting modern Islamist jihadis for doing the same thing now?
So our president doesn't to everything about our enemies. In only 6 years he's made tremendous progress, no?
But he's going to be just fine.
